“Our most beautiful dreams are born from our most unpleasant nightmares.”
What if Netflix ran life and “skip pain” was an option? We’d all leave our friend alone and sign up immediately. But again, life don’t work like that, there’s no skipping this. Like it or not, pain is there! When you don’t want it, where you don’t want it, how you don’t want it, it is there. So the deal dictates immeasurable amounts of pain but what if we didn’t waste it, what if we didn’t see it as the enemy and saw it more as something that is there to help us.
We shouldn’t fear difficult times, although there is a temptation to just wish to just take pain away from our lives. How we wish we could make the pain go away without dealing with the issues that were causing the pain, a ‘band-aid’ for the pain, done and dusted in a quick moment. Known as the dark night of the soul, the storm, the suffering, serves a purpose. The happiest people are those who have undergone hardship to emerge with deep wisdom to share with others, your response to hardship is measured by your attitude, and mental resilience and how you interpret how events shape your life. There are only two choices when facing hardships: rise to the challenge and overcome it, or retreat into despair.
Suffering initiates a search for significance. It is important to make sense of and find meaning and purpose in suffering and growing past limits creates vulnerability. We all need one another, and nothing is certain or uncertain, they are both illusions. Humans cannot predict exactly what is going to occur so letting go of sureness of an outcome brings vulnerability. Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
Maya Angelou once wrote, “We delight in the beauty of the butterfly but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.” What we go through right now manifests to something greater in the years to come. If you didn’t have failures, If you didn’t have struggles, If you didn’t have disappointment, you could have no strength, no courage, no compassion. Those qualities are made from your pain and struggle.
Struggles, challenges, and hard times offer you much more value than any other time in your life. You cannot grow without struggle. You cannot get stronger without resistance. Think about a time in your life that may have been hard but forced you to become better. Get grateful for the struggles and work on yourself to ensure your future has much more pleasure than pain.
“No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown.”